Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

By late 1987 Jerry decided to form a new band. Layne, remembering his encounter with Sean at Alki Beach a few years earlier, still had the piece of paper on which Sean had written his girlfriend’s phone number. Jerry called the number, spoke with Melinda Starr, and ultimately set up a meeting with Sean. Sean and Melinda went to the Music Bank and listened to Jerry’s demos. At that point, Jerry mentioned that they would need a bass player to jam with and had someone in mind. “I jammed with this guy Mike Starr a year or so ago, and he seemed like kind of a cool dude.”

“That’s weird, because this is his sister,” Sean said as he pointed at Melinda, “and I’ve been in bands with Mike on and off since we were eleven or twelve or something.” Sean called Mike, and within a day or two he came to the Music Bank, borrowed some gear, and jammed with Sean and Jerry for the first time.

Layne would jam with Jerry’s new band. During their second or third rehearsal, they were playing a cover of Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Hanky Panky”—an idea credited to Mike—when a local promoter walking the hallways of the Music Bank overheard. He was looking for bands for a show he was putting together at Kane Hall.

“Hey, what’s the name of the band? Can you play?” the promoter asked.

“We didn’t really have a band, but we were like, ‘Yeah, totally,’” Sean recalled.

“Can you play a half hour, forty minutes?”

“Sure, we’ve got a bunch of songs.” In reality, Sean later explained, “We didn’t have any of the songs or anything, so we lied and said we could, and then we got a gig.”

They liked Layne and wanted him to join full-time. There was one problem—Layne didn’t want to commit because he was already working with Bergstrom and Holt. Ultimately, Jerry said, they worked out a short-term solution: Layne would sing with Jerry’s band, in exchange for Jerry playing guitar in Layne’s band.24 This is the beginning of Alice in Chains.

Chapter 6

Ha! We’re not rock stars! We’re in Seattle!

SEAN KINNEY

LAYNE INVITED JERRY to spend Christmas of 1987—the first since his mother’s death—with him and his family. Layne had approached his parents about it, telling them about his friend who was “kind of homeless” and didn’t have a family. “We made sure that Jerry had some gifts and some clothes, because he didn’t have a whole lot,” Jim Elmer recalled. “We bought him an army coat and a couple of other things that were kind of trendy at the time, and Layne got that as well.”

This was the first time Layne’s family met Jerry. Jim Elmer’s initial impressions at the time: “You could tell these guys were buddies, and Jerry was very respectful—he was not loud or boisterous or too into himself or whatnot. He was very pleasant and certainly liked—in the outset, he really liked being there, and so he wasn’t rambunctious or anything.”

At the beginning of 1988, Jerry and Layne were pulling double duty between the then-nascent Alice in Chains and 40 Years of Hate—with Layne singing and Jerry playing guitar in both bands. For a brief time, Alice in Chains went by the names Mothra and Fuck. Jerry credited Sean for coming up with the name Fuck. “We weren’t getting work anyway, so we thought it wouldn’t hurt us,” Layne said.1

They made stickers that said FUCK (THE BAND) and put them on condoms to pass around as a gimmick. The novelty and shock value of the name was offset by its detrimental effect on publicity, problematic for any new band when print and broadcast media can’t print or say the band’s name.2 Years later, a FUCK (THE BAND) sticker can still be seen on one of Jerry’s guitars, but the letter F has either worn away or been deliberately removed. But this name didn’t work out, and the band became Diamond Lie after Jerry got permission to use the name from his former bandmates.

The lineup for 40 Years of Hate consisted of Layne on vocals, Jerry on guitar, James Bergstrom on acoustic drums, Dave Martin on electronic drums, and Ron Holt on bass. They had about a dozen songs they would perform at rehearsals, but recordings exist for only seven or eight of them. Holt, who was traveling back and forth between Seattle and Los Angeles, recorded several songs during a series of sessions at the Music Bank and his home in Edmonds, Washington. The earliest four-track master, which Holt thinks was recorded in the fall of 1987, was titled “1988 Full of Pain, Full of Hate.”